‘I was pretty lucky’: Motorcyclist who fell 40 feet off cliff near Harrison Lake rescued by strangers

TIPELLA (NEWS 1130) – He’s very bruised and even a bit broken, but a Maple Ridge man is thanking the strangers who may have saved his life on a backcountry road.

Michael Thomas, 49, was riding his dirt bike on the Harrison West forest road last Friday when he encountered a steep technical part of the road about 56 kilometres in. He revved his engine and tried his best to make the climb.

“I don’t really recall anything up until the point where I was going over the edge of the bank and started to go down the side of the mountain,” he said. “I hit a couple of rocks on the way down, and then the bike hit me shortly afterwards.”

Thomas believes he fell about 40 feet down a cliff.

“It seemed like an extremely long time for me being down there, but apparently it had only been about 17 minutes had gone by, from what I was told later on,” he said.

After regaining consciousness, he dragged himself back up to the road. Thomas said he couldn’t move once he got to the top “from all the pain.”

Waiting for help

Hunched over in pain, Thomas said he watched one vehicle drive right passed him.

“It was pretty disappointing,” Thomas admitted. “I was shouting at the guy, and then I guess he must have had his music on and he was just looking straightforward, I guess he didn’t even hear me.”

Eventually, Drazzo Jacobucci and his family spotted the injured biker and stopped to help.

“There was a man, just like keeled over on the road and that’s totally out of place because there was no vehicle around. I just drove up and pulled up behind him and I asked him if he was ok,”
Jacobucci recalled, adding the man, Thomas, was “visibly in pain.”

“Just so lucky, you know, we looked over the edge and saw where his bike was,” Jacobucci said. “He said that his friend — because he was travelling with a buddy — his friend went up that stretch and told him to stay to a certain section.”

(Courtesy Drazzo Jacobucci)

He believes Thomas’ friend just didn’t realize he had gone over the cliff. By the time Jacobucci and his family loaded Thomas into their truck, the friend was spotted walking back down.

Thomas said the group drove him about an hour and a half to the Tipella Reserve — located near the head of Harrison Lake — to get help.

“They called the ambulance from there and I was put in one of the bunkhouses, and a lady stayed with me for about 15 minutes,” Thomas said. “Then a gentleman named Henry came and stood with me, and chatted with me, and kept me company for a couple of hours.”

An ambulance and helicopter eventually showed up at the same time. Thomas was air lifted to the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster.

“They took a lot of X rays and did a CT scan — everything turned up pretty good,” Thomas told NEWS 1130, explaining he suffered a lot of bruising, a broken arm, and some broken fingers — all “such minor injuries.”

“I was pretty lucky,” Thomas said.

To anyone wanting to ride the same trail, Thomas’ piece of advice is to take your time, plot your routes better — “better than I did, anyway,” he said, and stay away from the edge of the road.

Always lends a hand

For Jacobucci, stopping to see if Thomas needed a hand wasn’t even a question.

“Just about anybody that’s pulled over on the side of the road or anything like that, I’m always stopping, slowing down, asking if people need help,” he said. Jacobucci estimates he’s helped at least three people over the last couple of months.

Despite the current manhunt across Canada for two suspected killers from Vancouver Island, Jacobucci said he’ll continue to read each situation on a case-by-case basis if it appears someone’s in need of help.

“Just reading the vibe and the situation, I think we always have to put other people before ourselves and I think it’s a bigger responsibility when you’re in the middle of nowhere like that to also be helping,” Jacobucci said. “Mike was also saying that there was a Jeep that passed by, and that’s super sad. If the injuries would have been worse, or he could have been possibly bleeding out and barely made it up to the road. If someone doesn’t slow down or doesn’t stop and check, then that could have been it.”

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